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Sunday, August 9, 2015

Catch up 2014 and 2015

I was really struggling with the colouring on my comic with the scarecrow. In a lot of ways it looks superior to the stuff I'm doing now. But it came at the cost of the time it was taking. I'd like to finish it someday. But it was a stepping stone to the system I have now.

2014
I was looking for a way to speed up the creation of environments and backgrounds. I started experimenting with procedural generation of buildings.

The way the buildings came out made me take a new approach to colouring my drawings and comics. The buildings have no outlines. And there is a hierarchy in the variation of colour.

I made a bunch of little comics trying out this new way of colouring. Having a unified system freed up the drawing. I found myself simplifying things rather than adding in more detail. I finished a short comic I wanted to do for lost plot about the silent movie era. Made a pitch for a starwars spin off movie called "biggs and ackbar smash people up on speeder bikes", and a comic about a dream I had about when they put a sloth thing in my meter cupboard.

I'm not sure where these things are going to find a home. But importantly the meter cupboard one was submitted to an anthology. Not that they printed it, but normally I'm not happy enough with my stuff to want to share it.
2015
Disaster. The new vat rules really put a stop to everything I was working towards. with no support and every one online struggling to understand the mess. Effectively I have to sell through 3rd parties rather than being independent. So I went back to making 3d models for video games for my freelance work. Unfortunately its a massive time sink for R and D, glitches and infrastructure that all needs finalising before I can release a single model.

Eventually though I'm drawn back to comics as i have a system to produce pages each month. Completed pages feel more valuable to me than R and D or technical work that theres no way of getting paid for. I'm planing to put my comic on tapastic which has a website and apps. they have come up with a way of handling the vat stuff also. So I'm going to let them handle all that and I'm focusing on making pages.
In may I redirected my efforts to working on this comic.
1) The title will be giant space owl
2) You will be able to read it on tapastic
3) There will be three or four pages per update
4) It will update every fortnight.
That's quite a lot of stuff over the last couple of years. I've been working on individual blog posts about all the things I've touched on. But as I work towards the launch of the comic there are too many little jobs and they are starting cut into the production of actual pages.
I kind of wanted to build up to the launch. But your just getting this overview for now. I'm not sure how I'm going to promote the comic. But I'm setting up files now and I've given the series a bunch of tags including "moon boots" so i guess a lot of people will find it through that. because everyone is constantly doing searches for them right?